Word: niro
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Then you start thinking of comparisons: Robert De Niro blowing the star-spangled mailbox to smithereens in Mean Streets; Al Pacino in uniform at his sister's wedding in The Godfather, telling Diane Keaton how his father enforced a contract, his voice full of casual, measured menace; Dustin Hoffman end-running out of the church in The Graduate. At moments like those, you expect the film to freeze and to see a title appear: "The legend starts here." Travolta's walk said that...
File Carr's appraisal for the moment under "glamour" and consider all that De Niro-Pacino-Hoffman talk going around as so much well-intentioned rooting interest. The movie star Travolta most clearly calls to mind is Montgomery Clift. Travolta may lack the depth of Cliffs gifts, but he has much the same quicksilver charm. He too can give an audience the sense of immediate but always fragile intimacy, of shared secrets, of private truths known without speaking...
...sagas of ruinous excess and careening self-destruction. Superstars very often provide their own portfolio of legends to join the ones fashioned for the screen: the abandon of Brando, the hipster brashness of James Dean. If the material isn't available, then the superstars get tagged with it?De Niro is alleged to be Garboesque, Pacino sullen and distant, Redford some kind of Crunchy Granola mystic who holes up alone in Utah...
...play. Both Donny and Bobby (jitteringly played by Lloyd Brass) are deferential to Teach, a self-assured, macho punk and Donny's old buddy. Guilfoyle brings an excellent manic intensity to his part. His mannerisms, a shambling set of neverending words and motions, are largely reminiscent of Robert De Niro in Mean Streets. Teach, a grown-up yet immature punk, follows De Niro's Johnny Boy, save that Guilfoyle lacks De Niro's genius, and his Teach is self-consciously smart, whereas Johnny Boy is too dumb to know any better...
Before there was Pacino, or De Niro, or Nicholson-before there were James Dean and Marlon Brando even -there was Montgomery Clift. Bursting onto the screen in Red River and The Search (both 1948), Clift set the standard for a whole generation of actors. He was intense and hypnotically alive. His lines seemed to come not from the script but from the gut, and he seemed dangerously unpredictable, like a high-tension wire torn from its moorings. For the better part of a decade, Clift was the star producers sought first. But then, in the longest suicide in Hollywood history...